# Average IQ of Typical Trump Supporter **URL:** \ **Category:** The BBQ Pit\ **Created:** [May 30, 2020, 5:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/average-iq-of-typical-trump-supporter/854743 "2020-05-30T17:44:18Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![Wendell\_Wagner](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/8491ac/32.png) [@Wendell\_Wagner](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Wendell_Wagner)\ **Post date:** [May 31, 2020, 8:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/average-iq-of-typical-trump-supporter/854743/41 "2020-05-31T20:37:24Z")
Wesley Clark, the value of the S&P 500 on Jan 1, 1970 was $90.31, while the value of the S&P 500 on May 29, 2020 was $3,044.31, so $1 invested on January 1, 1970 would be worth $33.71 on May 29, 2020. ---
**Author:** ![CairoCarol](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/cairocarol/32/3825_2.png) [@CairoCarol](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CairoCarol)\ **Post date:** [May 31, 2020, 9:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/average-iq-of-typical-trump-supporter/854743/42 "2020-05-31T21:15:56Z")
This is an absurd OP. “IQ” is a murky, poorly defined concept. Sure, we all “know” what an IQ is and look to things like standardized tests to measure it. And as long as we stick with a very narrow definition, we can say that person A is “smarter” than person B because they got a higher numerical score on their SATs or some such thing. But these scores tell us nothing about the worth of a human. Someone might be a talented musician, an insightful friend, an exceptional dancer or athlete, or any one of a million wonderful expressions of what’s best about humanity, and score poorly on an IQ test. Anyway, who cares what the average IQ of a Trump supporter is? It’s like asking “what do you think the average height of a Trump supporter is” and thinking liberal Democrats are probably taller and therefore better. Think of it this way: suppose someone with liberal Democratic values runs a brilliant campaign to reach all those people who fit the stereotype of a “low-IQ” Trump supporter. This hypothetical candidate assembles and listens to strategists who cook up an effective strategy to sway those voters. Little by little, the polls edge toward the point that the liberal Dem has landslide-levels of support in what were previously Trump strongholds. Now…do you still care about the average IQ of these voters? If you’ve decided they are stupid, do you not want their votes for your preferred candidate? ---
**Author:** ![Voyager](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/voyager/32/133_2.png) [@Voyager](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Voyager)\ **Post date:** [June 1, 2020, 7:22pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/average-iq-of-typical-trump-supporter/854743/43 "2020-06-01T19:22:51Z")
Trump take an IQ test? No way. He doesn’t have the attention span to make it through the test, and it is too much reading. Maybe if Hannity read it to him. ---
**Author:** ![Wesley\_Clark](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/wesley_clark/32/20581_2.png) [@Wesley\_Clark](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Wesley_Clark)\ **Post date:** [June 2, 2020, 2:25am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/average-iq-of-typical-trump-supporter/854743/44 "2020-06-02T02:25:40Z")
> [@Wendell\_Wagner](#): > > Wesley Clark, the value of the S&P 500 on Jan 1, 1970 was $90.31, while the value of the S&P 500 on May 29, 2020 was $3,044.31, so $1 invested on January 1, 1970 would be worth $33.71 on May 29, 2020. I was basing mine on this. [https://www.icmarc.org/x3333.html?RFID=W1470](https://www.icmarc.org/x3333.html?RFID=W1470) Reading the fine print, this one says with dividends reinvested, maybe thats where the difference comes from. ---
**Author:** ![Wendell\_Wagner](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/8491ac/32.png) [@Wendell\_Wagner](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Wendell_Wagner)\ **Post date:** [June 2, 2020, 4:09am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/average-iq-of-typical-trump-supporter/854743/45 "2020-06-02T04:09:04Z")
O.K., that chart begins on January 1, 1974. The table that I was working from is given below. On January 1, 1974, the S&P 500 was $96.11. On June 1, 2020, it was $3,055.73. So over that period, a dollar invested without reinvesting any of the dividends would be worth $31.79. A dollar invested while reinvesting all the dividends would be worth $154. It’s possible for someone who has a job that allows them to live strictly on their salary without touching the money invested in the S&P 500 to reinvest all their dividends. However, if the $413 million given on January 1, 1974 is everything one lives on, not all the dividends can be reinvested. So that $413 million would become somewhere between $13,129,270,000 and $63,602,000,000, depending on how much of one’s dividends one spends. Of course, the amount could be less than that if one not only spends all one’s dividends but takes money out of the account: > **[S&P 500 Historical Prices by Year](https://www.multpl.com/s-p-500-historical-prices/table/by-year)** > > S&P 500 Historical Prices table by year, historic, and current data. Current S&P 500 Historical Prices is 4,079.09, a change of -11.32 from previous market close. ---
**Author:** ![Babale](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/babale/32/15666_2.png) [@Babale](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Babale)\ **Post date:** [June 2, 2020, 1:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/average-iq-of-typical-trump-supporter/854743/46 "2020-06-02T13:09:55Z")
> [@Wendell\_Wagner](#): > > O.K., that chart begins on January 1, 1974. The table that I was working from is given below. On January 1, 1974, the S&P 500 was $96.11. On June 1, 2020, it was $3,055.73. So over that period, a dollar invested without reinvesting any of the dividends would be worth $31.79. A dollar invested while reinvesting all the dividends would be worth $154. It’s possible for someone who has a job that allows them to live strictly on their salary without touching the money invested in the S&P 500 to reinvest all their dividends. However, if the $413 million given on January 1, 1974 is everything one lives on, not all the dividends can be reinvested. So that $413 million would become somewhere between $13,129,270,000 and $63,602,000,000, depending on how much of one’s dividends one spends. Of course, the amount could be less than that if one not only spends all one’s dividends but takes money out of the account: > > [S&P 500 Historical Prices by Year - Multpl](https://www.multpl.com/s-p-500-historical-prices/table/by-year) Taking money out could slow down your growth? What if you took out money to try and invest in a business, but that business failed, so you took out more money, failed again, rinse repeat about 6 times? Sounds like a pretty poor businessman performance to me. ---
**Author:** ![Wendell\_Wagner](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/8491ac/32.png) [@Wendell\_Wagner](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Wendell_Wagner)\ **Post date:** [June 2, 2020, 1:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/average-iq-of-typical-trump-supporter/854743/47 "2020-06-02T13:27:58Z")
That was exactly my point. ---
**Author:** ![Buck\_Godot](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/buck_godot/32/6573_2.png) [@Buck\_Godot](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Buck_Godot)\ **Post date:** [June 2, 2020, 7:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/average-iq-of-typical-trump-supporter/854743/48 "2020-06-02T19:07:38Z")
I don’t think that it’s low IQ level that is driving the Trump train. The largest indicators of Trump support are cultural rather than intellectual. The ignorance that Trump voters supporters display is mostly willful ignorance fueled by confirmation bias, and poor sources of information, not lack of basic intelligence. I ran a quick and dirty analysis comparing [average IQ by state](https://worldpopulationreview.com/states/average-iq-by-state/) with the log ratio between [Clinton and Trump votes in 2016](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_United_States_presidential_election#Results_by_state). The end result was a correlation of 0.016 with a p-value of 0.917. In other words absolutely and completely zilch. There was even less of a relationship between the two than one would normally expect from random data. ---
**Author:** ![Buck\_Godot](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/buck_godot/32/6573_2.png) [@Buck\_Godot](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Buck_Godot)\ **Post date:** [June 2, 2020, 7:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/average-iq-of-typical-trump-supporter/854743/49 "2020-06-02T19:33:12Z")
ETA: Incidentally there appears to be a HUGE correlation between the IQ of states and their [average latitude](https://inkplant.com/code/state-latitudes-longitudes), (r=0.63, p=1x10^-6 or if you eliminate Alaska r=0.78 p=4.8\*10^-11). I’ll leave the implications of this (if any) for a future thread. ---
**Author:** ![BobLibDem](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/boblibdem/32/3149_2.png) [@BobLibDem](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BobLibDem)\ **Post date:** [July 21, 2020, 2:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/average-iq-of-typical-trump-supporter/854743/50 "2020-07-21T14:03:29Z")
I don’t think native intelligence measured by IQ tests gets into it at all. You can be smart as a whip and be willfully ignorant. The modern Republican voter may not be stupid, but they are quite likely to be racist. They fear the unknown. They hate that a black guy served 8 years as president, and they applaud his successor’s attempts to erase his achievements. They don’t give a fuck that they lose their health care, they want to see the black guy’s plan go down. They hate “others” because they don’t interact with them, many have never talked to a Muslim or worked with one, they know few if any black or brown people, few if any non-Christians. So they see all these people that don’t look like them or pray like them and they get afraid that their lives as they know it are threatened, so much that they will vote for a guy who is screwing them over big time but tolerate it because he hates the same people they do. Their shortcomings are in their hearts, not their heads. ---
**Author:** ![KneadToKnow](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/kneadtoknow/32/3999_2.png) [@KneadToKnow](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/KneadToKnow)\ **Post date:** [July 21, 2020, 2:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/average-iq-of-typical-trump-supporter/854743/51 "2020-07-21T14:07:39Z")
With apologies to Groucho Marx, I knew Mensa was overrated when I found out I qualified for membership. ---
**Author:** ![TriPolar](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/tripolar/32/3008_2.png) [@TriPolar](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/TriPolar)\ **Post date:** [July 21, 2020, 2:42pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/average-iq-of-typical-trump-supporter/854743/52 "2020-07-21T14:42:33Z")
At best IQ is a measurement of potential. Being a Trump supporter is a very low measurement on the scale of actual. ---
**Author:** ![Tfletch1](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/tfletch1/32/5340_2.png) [@Tfletch1](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Tfletch1)\ **Post date:** [July 21, 2020, 3:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/average-iq-of-typical-trump-supporter/854743/53 "2020-07-21T15:02:56Z")
> [@furt](#): > > Trump took a million from his father and turned it into billions This has been disputed by many sources. Just one of many cites: [https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/02/us/politics/donald-trump-wealth-fred-trump.html](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/02/us/politics/donald-trump-wealth-fred-trump.html) ---
**Author:** ![robby](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/robby/32/11048_2.png) [@robby](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/robby)\ **Post date:** [July 21, 2020, 3:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/average-iq-of-typical-trump-supporter/854743/54 "2020-07-21T15:19:41Z")
> [@furt](#): > > …Then with no training in show business, he turned himself into a long-running televison star. On this note, there was an interesting article in _The New Yorker_ back in December 2018: > **[How Mark Burnett Resurrected Donald Trump as an Icon of American Success —...](https://apple.news/A3es_aIdpN-mJ20rnhOEV9A)** > > With “The Apprentice,” the TV producer mythologized Trump—then a floundering D-lister—as the ultimate titan, paving his way to the Presidency, Patrick Radden Keefe writes. According to the article, Trump’s rise to stardom was completely engineered by Mark Burnett and the the producers of the show. Similar to what Burnett had done on his earlier show “Survivor,” the producers used only a tiny fraction of the footage they had available to tell whatever story they wanted to. It’s a very long article, but here are a couple of excerpts: > [@](#): > > …“The Apprentice” was built around a weekly series of business challenges. At the end of each episode, Trump determined which competitor should be “fired.” But, as Braun explained, Trump was frequently unprepared for these sessions, with little grasp of who had performed well. Sometimes a candidate distinguished herself during the contest only to get fired, on a whim, by Trump. When this happened, Braun said, the editors were often obliged to “reverse engineer” the episode, scouring hundreds of hours of footage to emphasize the few moments when the exemplary candidate might have slipped up, in an attempt to assemble an artificial version of history in which Trump’s shoot-from-the-hip decision made sense. > > …Originally, Burnett had planned to cast a different mogul in the role of host each season. But Trump took to his part more nimbly than anyone might have predicted. He wouldn’t read a script—he stumbled over the words and got the enunciation all wrong. But off the cuff he delivered the kind of zesty banter that is the lifeblood of reality television. He barked at one contestant, “Sam, you’re sort of a disaster. Don’t take offense, but everyone hates you.” Katherine Walker told me that producers often struggled to make Trump seem coherent, editing out garbled syntax and malapropisms. “We cleaned it up so that he was his best self,” she said, adding, “I’m sure Donald thinks that he was never edited.” ---
**Author:** ![slash2k](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/439d5e/32.png) [@slash2k](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/slash2k)\ **Post date:** [July 21, 2020, 4:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/average-iq-of-typical-trump-supporter/854743/55 "2020-07-21T16:25:44Z")
> [@Velocity](#): > > 1. Democrats have their own demographic that may be low IQ as well: inner city/urban low-income minorities, etc., which may neutralize the IQ factor. While this certainly isn’t a “safe” or politically correct topic, @Velocity is actually factually correct. There is a strong correlation between [measured IQ and socioeconomic status](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4641149/) (see also [here](http://ftp.iza.org/dp11158.pdf)), and at least in the US, there is a fairly strong correlation between [measured IQ and race](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_intelligence#Test_scores). WHY this is so is the subject of [much controversy and argument](https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/9780815746096_chapter1.pdf); it’s the classic nature vs nurture argument, including how much of the difference is due to environmental factors such as nutrition and childhood exposure to lead and other industrial pollutants, social influences such as the value placed on education by the family/neighborhood, or hidden biases and cultural assumptions built in the IQ tests themselves, as opposed to strictly genetic factors. It would be racist to assert that blacks have lower IQs merely because they are black, but asserting that, collectively, groups of low-income people and American minorities (other than Asian-Americans) have lower than average scores on IQ tests is unfortunately true. ---
**Author:** ![Whack-a-Mole](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/whack-a-mole/32/141_2.png) [@Whack-a-Mole](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Whack-a-Mole)\ **Post date:** [July 22, 2020, 2:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/average-iq-of-typical-trump-supporter/854743/56 "2020-07-22T14:06:56Z")
> [@slash2k](#): > > While this certainly isn’t a “safe” or politically correct topic, @Velocity is actually factually correct. There is a strong correlation between [measured IQ and socioeconomic status](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4641149/) (see also [here](http://ftp.iza.org/dp11158.pdf)), and at least in the US, there is a fairly strong correlation between [measured IQ and race](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_intelligence#Test_scores). You are conflating IQ with academic achievement. While IQ does bear on academic achievement it is really a measure of potential. Whether you reach that potential or not is up to many other factors such as socioeconomic status. To say there is a strong correlation between IQ and race is wildly off base and misses a whole lot. > The first tests showing differences in IQ scores between different population groups in the United States were the tests of [United States Army](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Army) recruits in [World War I](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_I). In the 1920s, groups of [eugenics](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics) lobbyists argued that these results demonstrated that [African-Americans](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African-Americans) and certain immigrant groups were of inferior intellect to [Anglo-Saxon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-Saxons) [white people](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_people), and that this was due to innate biological differences; and they used such beliefs to justify policies of [racial segregation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racial_segregation). However, soon other studies appeared, contesting these conclusions and arguing instead that the Army tests had not adequately controlled for environmental factors, such as socio-economic and educational [inequality between black people and white people](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racial_inequality_in_the_United_States). Later observations of phenomena such as the [Flynn effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect) have also highlighted the ways that environmental factors affect group IQ differences. [SOURCE](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_intelligence) ---
**Author:** ![slash2k](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/439d5e/32.png) [@slash2k](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/slash2k)\ **Post date:** [July 22, 2020, 3:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/average-iq-of-typical-trump-supporter/854743/57 "2020-07-22T15:55:07Z")
I said “measured IQ”: i.e, the score on the [Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wechsler_Adult_Intelligence_Scale) or other IQ test. That’s what we’re talking about here: the average IQ of people in a particular group. American Blacks, as a group, have a collective average score roughly one standard deviation (15 points) lower than American non-Hispanic whites. [That gap has narrowed over the past 75 years or so](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-9280.2006.01802.x) (paywalled; [a preprint is here](https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/20060619_iq.pdf)), but it has not disappeared. Yes, socioeconomic status undoubtedly plays a huge role; that’s why I mentioned it in my original post. Inner-city minorities on average have lower socioeconomic status. I am not attempting to argue that there must be some innate genetic difference; I merely point out that in the US, “inner city/urban low-income minorities” consistently have average IQ test scores that are below the median for US adults. This is actually a phenomenon observed worldwide: > Around the world, the average IQ for East Asians centers around 106; that for Whites, about 100; and that for Blacks, about 85 in the United States and 70 in sub-Saharan Africa. –[http://www1.udel.edu/educ/gottfredson/30years/Rushton-Jensen30years.pdf](http://www1.udel.edu/educ/gottfredson/30years/Rushton-Jensen30years.pdf) , p. 6 These are observed facts demonstrating a pretty strong correlation between measured IQ and race. WHY they are true makes for some really interesting questions about the legacy of centuries of institutional racism and colonialism and the lingering effects thereof. If you don’t acknowledge the facts, however, then how can you grapple with the questions? ---
**Author:** ![Munch](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/munch/32/5281_2.png) [@Munch](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Munch)\ **Post date:** [July 22, 2020, 7:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/average-iq-of-typical-trump-supporter/854743/58 "2020-07-22T19:54:36Z")
> [@Wendell\_Wagner](#): > > However, if the $413 million given on January 1, 1974 > [@mhendo](#): > > Do you understand the difference between 1 million and 413 million? > [@squeegee](#): > > [Trump’s father gave him at least $413 million dollars](https://www.marketwatch.com/story/trumps-father-gave-his-son-at-least-413-million-new-york-times-2018-10-02). I also doubt Trump’s claim that he took a “small” amount of money to build his fortune on his own, but the $413 million figure that is continually being used in this thread is, when you drill down to the original NYT article, “$413 million _ **in today’s dollars** _”. ---
**Author:** ![TriPolar](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/tripolar/32/3008_2.png) [@TriPolar](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/TriPolar)\ **Post date:** [July 22, 2020, 8:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/average-iq-of-typical-trump-supporter/854743/59 "2020-07-22T20:01:45Z")
> [@Munch](#): > > I also doubt Trump’s claim that he took a “small” amount of money to build his fortune on his own, but the $413 million figure that is continually being used in this thread is, when you drill down to the original NYT article, “$413 million _ **in today’s dollars** _ Yeah. Back then it was barely worth $125 million. We used to find money like that lying around on the sidewalk. Everybody borrowed small amounts like $100 million from their father to get started in life. ---
**Author:** ![Munch](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/munch/32/5281_2.png) [@Munch](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Munch)\ **Post date:** [July 22, 2020, 8:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/average-iq-of-typical-trump-supporter/854743/60 "2020-07-22T20:03:56Z")
That would be why I put quotes around “small”. But if we’re going to all play in the thread about how one demographic is dumber than our demographic, let’s try to read our own cites correctly. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/average-iq-of-typical-trump-supporter/854743.md?page=2) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/average-iq-of-typical-trump-supporter/854743.md?page=4)